My idea is that everywhere that scales are available (as an assessment tool) in various modules, Id recommend adding/allowing two more tools:
Rubrics and action assessments.
The ideas if that if a journal were graded and also had a rubric attached, the rubric would appear in the journal report that the teacher sees when she is grading. Likewise, the rubric would appear (below the comment and custom scales) on the view.php and index.php pages for the student.
Heres a breakdown of the two new elements:
Rubrics = the Assessment Element section of Rays Workshop and Exercise mods. I think Ray has done a great job building those assessment tables, and just wish that course-wide rubrics could be created and used on any activity. In the grade reports, I would recommend putting a tiny rubric icon next to the students grade (if a rubric is attached to that particular grade) so that the student can find out more information about what went right or wrong.
Action Assessments = a newish idea (I think). Id recommend that each teacher create a bank of assessment criteria: maybe an English teacher needs to occassionally identify problems with split infinitives -- maybe he also wants to point out problems with topic sentences, with citations, with pronoun agreement, with punctuation, etc.. Each of the assessments in this bank would have a title, a description, and would point to an existing activity in the course that addresses the particular issue (think of this activity as a refresher or as remedial).
When an action assessment is attached to an activity, the teacher (in the process of grading) would create a diagnostic list of one (or more) of the problems with the student's work (maybe a pull-down menu of the bank?). The action assessment would reference the bank table and display the follow-up activities assigned to that particular problem, thus allowing each diagnosed issue to be tracked with an activity (or drill).
example
Score:
B-
Active Assessments for this activity:
| problem: | comment: | follow-up action: |
| run-on sentences | Johnny, this assignment is riddled with run-on sentences. | lesson on run-on sentences |
I imagine that each student would have his own Action Assessment page, where new action tasks would appear in a master list with the referring assignments and the scores of the follow-up activities.
Tonys Action Assessment Overview:
| problem: | date: | referring activity: | follow-up action: | follow-up score: |
| split infinitives | January 12, 03 | Journal #3 | infinitive quiz | 76% on quiz |
| topic sentences | February 2, 04 | Fishing Assignment | lesson on topic sentences | 85% on lesson |
| reading for detail | March 12, 04 | forum discussion of Yeats Among Schoolchildren | resource link to a copy of the poem | unread |
I guess my greater notion is that departments or schools should develop the assessment criteria bank (and the follow-up remedial assignments) together. This system would allow a skill-tracking that would be pretty remarkable.
What do you folks think?
-Tom
p.s. I don't want to get too complicated here, but imagine being able to create a big list of action assessments while grading an off-line paper. The teacher might have a list like this:
| priority: | problem: | comment: | follow-up action |
| 1 | topic sentences | Johnny, your topic sentences don't indicate how the paragraph belongs within the argument | topic-sentence lesson |
| 2 | mixed tenses | Your sentences are shifting back and forth between tenses. Stay consistent. | resource on tenses in literary essays |
| 3 | unclear sentence | I'm unclear what you mean in the sentence that I've marked #3. | resource on how to revise for sentence clarity |
| 4 | unclear progression | Look in the hard-copy of your essay to where I've marked #4. haven't you already made this point in the previous paragraph? | resource on organizing paragraphs for logical progression |